I have mentioned previously, in response to a question, that I don’t like the Snap Preview plugin for blogs.

It seems that I am not alone in this. Nick Wilson has written a piece on his blog about why he can’t stand the Snap Preview and while some of the commentery is tongue in cheek, some hits the nail right on the head.

Anyone else dislike the Snap plugin (or is it just Nick and I who are grumpy, not-so-old men)?

UPDATE – I see a discussion is taking place on TechMeme about this too!

FURTHER UPDATE:

Donncha added a really cool possible solution to the Snaps Preview issue in the comments, he said:

One quick and easy solution would be to add a hosts entry for spa.snap.com pointing at 127.0.0.1 on your computer so that the Snap preview Javascript is never loaded. I havenâ€™t tried it myself but that should work!

Dave Winer has a good thread on this. Matt’s answer is that geeks hate it and everyone else loves it and he has the emails to prove it, that’s why it is turned on by default. I hate it, my wife loves it. Go figure.

This is not an official wordpress.com response, only my personal opinion as I had nothing to do with the Snap preview stuff.

I don’t mind them myself, but then, most of the blogs I read don’t use them but when I do come across them it’s usually because I’m about to click the link that activated the preview. It disappears when I click it so no harm done.

On the occasions when the mouse pointer accidentally hovers over a link while I’m reading then I do find it annoying but not enough to get hot and bothered about it. Maybe I’m in a good mood today!

I am surprised that the snap preview was enabled by default on wordpress.com and I won’t defend it by saying the usual guff, “Oh but the user can disable it in the backend if they want” because that’s just a cop-out.

One quick and easy solution would be to add a hosts entry for spa.snap.com pointing at 127.0.0.1 on your computer so that the Snap preview Javascript is never loaded. I haven’t tried it myself but that should work! 🙂

Actually I just checked that problem I thought of when commenting on Dave’s blog – parental controls.

I have all the kids PCs locked down where if a site does not have a “harmless” rating then the kids can’t view it until I override the block on a case by case basis.

Snap Preview circumvents this by showing previews of sites which may not be suitable for my kids. Not a huge problem as I don’t see NickJr turning it on but anything which takes control from the web-user is something I cannot be in favour of.

Soble’s reply is funny; “I have been talking with the Snap folks, though, and they are working hard on answering these concerns.”

The only serious thing I think they can do is to make it an opt-in system and not an opt-out. And not some big alert going “Do you want Snap Preview on this site?” but something discreet that I never have to see. Not that that will help those who might like it but don’t know about it.

It seems to be one of those nice but flawed ideas that web-developers should move on from. Like BLINK markup.

I sort of like it so that makes me a semi-geek (using Dilbert logic) – the basic problem is load speed. Sometimes it plain sucks. Other times it’s gorgeous. It gives me a sense of what the linked site looks lie and as they say – looking good helps.